1967 Ads: The Cheetah

Selected Cheetah ads. Voice issue dates and other pertinent info in the captions.




1/19/67 issue: Wilson Pickett and the Magnificent Men, presented by Rocky G. and Frankie Crocker, Sunday January 22.

4/27/67 issue.

This copy came from the 8/17/67 issue, but it appeared regularly for several weeks that summer.

8/31/67 issue: Joe Tex on September 4 (I think); The Bit A Sweet and the Showstoppers, August 31-September 6 (I think); announcement of upcoming Chicago and L.A. locations.

9/14/67 issue--this ad appeared several times that autumn.

10/19/67 issue: The Box Tops and Procol Harum on October 29.

10/26/67 issue: The Box Tops, October 29 (apparently Procol Harum cancelled). The Jewels and the All-Night Workers, October 26 to November 1.

11/30/67 issue: Psychedelic Christmas Tree Happening on December 12.

12/14/67 issue: The Kaleidoscope, starting December 12.

12/21/67 issue: Announcement that Hair moves from the Public Theater to the Cheetah.

12/21/67 issue: New Year's Eve with Mike St. Shaw and the Original Prophets, the Dave Heenan Set, the Scarecrow, Band of Gold. Hair opening date is listed in the fine print as December 22.


UPDATE 11/15/2011:  Please see the revised and improved post on 1967 Cheetah ads here.

Spotted Cheetahs Redux

Further to yet another very old post, a while back I received a lovely e-mail from a lady named Valerie who shared some of her memories of the Cheetah. She kindly granted permission for me to repost her text here.


I read with much interest your blog about the Cheetah, Broadway and 53rd Street. As a former Cheetah regular, I enjoyed going back in time and reliving memories.

My friends and I went to the Cheetah every Friday, Saturday and holiday eve nights from 1966 to about 1969. Admission was $4.00 and there was no alcohol served. I understand the original Cheetah was at a location that used to be a roller rink. It was also adjacent to the Ed Sullivan Theater. Before entering the Cheetah, we would look over at a small club next door and watch Gene Krupa play the drums. The new Cheetah opened in October 1968 and it’s location was 52nd Street and 8th Avenue right across the street from Roseland. I also had a chance to visit sister Cheetahs in Montreal and Chicago.

At the Broadway and 53rd Street location I remember a few of the bands that played. Absolutely the best was the Commodores and the Gold Band. I also remember guest appearances by Gary Pucket and the Union Gap, Sham the Sham and the Pharoahs. Also the bands, the Bagatelles and the Chicago Loop. I remember very well when Hair was played but my friends and I were anxious for it to be over so we could dance the night away. Every month it seemed there was a new dance to learn; the monkey, swim, frug and so on.

For a time on Friday nights I remember a motorcycle gang, the New Jersey Aliens, would frequent the Cheetah. Their motorcycles were lined up and parked on 53rd Street. On these Friday nights, I observed the tension between them and a group of Hippies/Flower children who also gathered at the same corner near the Art Gallery. Words were spoken but never any major disturbances. I remember much excitement when Sidney Poiter paid a short visit as a guest.

Bouncers then were body builders, such as Harold Pool and a former Mr. Universe.

The Cheetah shuffle was a blend of dance steps and choreography and I have never seen anything like it since.

The new Cheetah on 52nd and 8th Avenue had two levels. The first floor was for the dance floor and the bands, and there was a soda fountain that was also called the “Poster Room.” The second floor had a small dance floor but mostly tables and chairs around a balcony that overlooked the 1st floor dance floor. There was a very long and beautiful bar but it was never attended or stocked. There was a smaller room that was for a small live band and it was called the “Mattress Room.” In the summer of 1969 I enjoyed so much the bands Johnny Maestro and the Brooklyn Bridge and Larry Davis and the Marvels.

There were many Cheetah regulars that I knew by first name only. I often wonder whatever happened to them. Occasionally we would try Trudy Heller’s Trik or the Electric Circus in the East Village only to see Cheetah regulars there also. But we would all wind up back at the Cheetah.

I wasn't aware the club had moved to a second location in '68. And they had a Montreal location as well--formidable!


While we're on the subject of wyld, deliciously different '60s NYC nightclubs, check out this Bowery Boys post from a few weeks ago on a truly obscure joint called Cerebrum.

Just a couple o' tidbits

I guess I never paid much attention to the plaque outside ST. MARKS SOUNDS at 20 St. Marks Place, 'cause my eyes sorta bugged out when I saw an entry for the building in my recently-purchased copy of Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel's The Landmarks of New York (New York: Monacelli Press, 2005). [God bless BMV Books!] Dating from 1832 and designated as a landmark in 1969, the house has some significant Old New York ties; its original owner was Daniel LeRoy, a South Street merchant who was a son-in-law of Elizabeth and Nicholas Fish (Elizabeth was a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant) and brother-in-law to Hamilton Fish. Diamonstein-Spielvogel writes:

The LeRoy House is constructed in Flemish bond brickwork trimmed with stone. It is one of four houses on the block that retain the ornately decorated iron handrails at the stoop, low, birdcage newel posts, and iron railings in the windows of the parlor floor. The arched stone entrance has a triple keystone and a Gibbs surround. Utilitarian doors and a plain transom have replaced the original entrance and its beautiful fanlight.

According to Andrew S. Dolkart's Guide to New York City Landmarks, Second Edition (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), the building is the "sole intact survivor" of a former "elegant row of 3 1/2-story brick houses erected on speculation by Thomas E. Davis."

As for the store--it's a fun place to look for bargain used CDs and vinyl, but I usually found its selection of new items to be lacking in breadth and depth. More new stuff used to be available at its sister location a few doors down at 16 St. Marks, but that shop is closed down now. I've never been to the Grassroots Tavern at the ground floor of 20 St. Marks, but it's apparently a pleasant dive.


From the "Still Spotting Cheetahs" file: There's a jazz specialty channel on Canadian digital cable called Cool TV--I watch it mainly for its Ed Sullivan, Judy Garland, Rosemary Clooney & Nat King Cole reruns, and also for its nightly "Cool Movie," which is either a great old musical or a drama about music. This past weekend they showed Young Man With A Horn, about the rise, fall, and resurrection of a trumpet player (supposedly loosely based on the life of Bix Beiderbecke). The story was rather predictable, but the cast couldn't be beat (Kirk Douglas, Doris Day, Lauren Bacall, & Hoagy Carmichael), the trumpet parts were dubbed in by Harry James, and there were lotsa lovely location shots of L.A. and NYC. Particularly notable among these were some long scenes at the Aragon Ballroom, which would years later be the home of the L.A. Cheetah. (Notice how I've conveniently bypassed discussion of the Aragon's '50s Lawrence Welk phase.)

And I'm gonna "See the Cheetah (At the Hangout)" tonite, when the Woggles play a rare Toronto gig at the Horseshoe Tavern!

Somehow I missed this Cheetah

I can't believe I didn't consult Popism: The Warhol '60s by Warhol and Pat Hackett (New York: Harper & Row, 1980) for the Cheetah entry. While researching info for the next site I'll be investigating, I came upon this:

Toward the end of April, a club called the Cheetah opened on Broadway and 53rd Street. It was a big operation, with a fifteen-hundred capacity, done up very slick with colored lights and vinyl strips hanging off the ceiling, and movies and slides and closed circuit TV, and spin-offs like a television room and a boutique.

And bands--the Velvets played at the opening; I saw Monti Rock III dash by in a glittering gold outfit, looking, he said, for Joan Crawford.

The Cheetah was the brainchild of Olivier Coquelin, and when it was in the planning stages, Olivier had asked me and Edie to be the host and hostess there--Andy and Edie's Up, he wanted to call it. But he and his backers were good business people and in those days we weren't--we were so loose when it came to things like schedules and contracts, and also, we never wanted to commit ourselves to anything; all we wanted was to run around and have a good time. So the next thing I knew, their beautiful slick club was opening--without me--and it was a sensation.

The clothes the guys wore at the Cheetah shows that they were catching up with the girls, discoing in the new styles--polka-dot shirts and bell-bottoms and boots and little caps.

But the most remarkable thing was that there was not one drop of liquor on the premises (they figured it would be impossible to check I.D.'s for thousands of kids who would all be right around the legal age limit), and nobody missed it. The kids weren't really drinking anymore anyway--drugs were a new thing on their minds; liquor seemed old-fashioned.

More Warholian-tinged madness to come...

[UPDATE 7/1/2005: Missed these Cheetahs as well. The Grateful Dead were booked there on June 12, 1967. And while recently perusing an Emitt Rhodes interview in a back issue of Scram magazine (I'm really digging the Merry-Go-Round reissue on Rev-ola), I found a reprint of a Cheetah business card which proved that there was indeed a connection between the N.Y., Chicago and L.A. clubs. The card also professed the existence of yet another Cheetah, in Union, New Jersey of all places. Haven't found any reference to a Jersey Cheetah elsewhere, though. Now I've gotta figure out if there was any affiliation with a late-'60s magazine that was also called Cheetah.]

I can always spot a Cheetah

I'll dedicate this entry to Mr. Doshna, my zany 9th grade Earth Science teacher back at good old St. Francis Prep. His droll delivery, augmented by his patented adenoidal Lawn Guyland whine, made even the dullest of geological factoids palatable. He often made fun of my ridiculous punk rock hairdo, as in, "Ms. C., your hair looks like a bird's nest." Whenever we had a test--and I seem to recall having them at least once a week--he'd pass out the Scan-tron multiple choice forms (regular Scan-trons for average-length tests, "mini"-Scan-trons for pop quizzes, and "Intergalactic-Mega-Scan-trons" for huge exams), put up "cheater boards" between our desks to prevent wandering eyes, and hang up a huge poster of a cheetah at the front of the room to serve as a constant reminder that he could "always spot a cheat-ah." A couple of times he deliberately left the poster down, just so he could cornily tell us that the cheetah was vacationing in Nairobi that week. Oh well...spot this:






(THE) CHEETAH, Broadway and 53rd Street. The Cheetah is widely regarded as the city's first super-sized, sensory-overload, multi-media mega-club. This may have been a new concept in New York nightclubbing, but the space it occupied had a history. Its previous incarnation was as I. Jay Faggan's Arcadia Ballroom, a jazz and dancing establishment which had played host to the likes of Ray Miller, Roy Eldridge, Larry Fotine, Benny Carter, Sonny James, and Les Brown. (The Arcadia itself had been remodeled in 1924 from a prior ballroom called the Blue Bird.) I'm not sure when the Arcadia closed, but the Cheetah took its place in April, 1966. According to Steven Watson's Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon, 2003), it "was the granddaddy of the big commercial disco":

The most elaborate discotheque was Cheetah, on Broadway and 53rd Street, where everybody, according to Life, looked like "a kook in a Kubla Khanteen." The three thousand colored lightbulbs dimmed and flicked and popped into an infinity of light patterns, reflecting off shiny aluminum sheets. Cheetah held two thousand people and offered not only dancing but a library, a movie room, and color television. "The Cheetah provides the most curious use of the intermedia," wrote Jonas Mekas. "Whereas the Dom shows are restricted (or became restricted) to the In-circle, Cheetah was designed for the masses. An attempt was made to go over the persona, over the ego to reach the impersonal, abstract, universal."

Brewster and Broughton's Last Night A DJ Saved My Life (New York: Grove Press, 1999) describes the place as follows:

[T]his had been opened by Le Club's staid Frenchman, Oliver Coquelin. Situated on the site of the Arcadia Ballroom near Broadway's theatre district, it threw its doors open on May 28, 1966. The cavernous space had a dancefloor with circular podiums scattered randomly like outsized polka dots. Each supported a girl frugging. Above, a cavalcade of 3,000 colored lights palpitated gently, while a boutique at the back sold the latest Carnaby Street fashions. And there was smooth and soft black velvet everywhere--except the bar, which was covered in fake fur. In the basement there was a TV room and on the upper floor a cinema showed the latest, strangest, underground movies. Variety got rather excited about this new boite: "GOTHAM'S NEW CHEETAH A KINGSIZED WATUSERY WITH A FORT KNOX POTENTIAL." A striking Puerto Rican teenager, Yvon Leybold, clad in hot pants and fishnets, ventured down from Spanish Harlem. "Cheetah was the first real disco club I went to," she recalls. "That was a lot of fun. It was a very mixed atmosphere. It was the first time I went into a place and you see lights and you see atmosphere, instead of the rinky-dink places I was used to."

Joel Lobenthal's Radical Rags: Fashions of the Sixties (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990) offers this description:

By the time Cheetah opened near Times Square in April 1966, the discotheque had become a self-contained Aladdin's Cave, in which the visitor surrendered his or her everyday identity in search of Dionysian transport. Cheetah employed many conspiring elements to bedazzle its switched-on congregation. Banks of colored lights shone on its patrons. Suspended high above the writhing crowds, huge sheets of chrome--a giant mobile created by industrial designer Michael Lax--undulated rhythmically, while at the club's opening night the customers echoed the mise en scene: "each girl was more electric than the next," Eugenia Sheppard reported. "The swinging hair. The wild colors. The mini-mini-skirts."...Cheetah initated a trend by selling earmarked discotheque attire in a boutique included in a multi-level complex consisting of dance floor, underground-film screening room, and hot dog stand. The proprietor of Cheetah's boutique noticed that many customers were purchasing clothes to exchange for those they had arrived in, so the checkrooms were specially expanded.

There were distractions a-plenty at the Cheetah, including the obligatory late-'60s light shows, but music (both live and discotheque), dancing, and partying were the club's main raisons d'etre. A few examples thereof:

Apparently the club had its own dance, according to this guy named Larry: He had to pay for the dance classes, but he learned more about moving his feet from his job at the Cheetah - New York's first discotheque. In between checking coats, Larry got his feet wet - so to speak - on the dance floor at the hottest of hot spots in the hottest of hot cities on the planet. "It's time for ... the Cheetah Shuffle!" That was the rallying cry - an approximation of it, anyway. Gangs of dancers would hit the floor at the call and perform the line-dance like moves and grooves that constituted the Cheetah Shuffle. The regulars, such as they were, got so attuned to the fancy footwork that they actually gave their motions names and numbers. "Cheetah 1!" "Cheetah 2,3!" "Cheetah Cheetah!" With a word or two and a number or two or three - and don't forget the exclamation point - the gangs would move in sequence. And Larry, because he was there every night, checking coats, was soon their leader.

The Squires played there in 1966, featuring Curtis Knight and pre-fame Jimi Hendrix (dig those site-specific cheetah-print shirts!). Richie Havens reminisces about young Jimi's performance here.




The Velvet Underground and Tiny Tim played the Cheetah on April 11, 1967. This event, a benefit for WBAI, was billed as "An Imperial Happening" to mark "the coronation of his Serene Highness, Prince Robert, first American Emperor of the Eastern Byzantine Roman Empire."

A Dark Shadows costume party was held there, possibly on a Halloween night, with cast members in attendance.

Between its Public Theater debut and its long Broadway run at the Biltmore Theater, HAIR had an engagement at the Cheetah from December 22, 1967 through January 28, 1968.

[I'll try to locate more examples in the future--somehow Cheetah is not the easiest club name in the world to google.]

Suzanne de Passe was the Cheetah's talent booker before embarking on careers as a Motown executive and later as head of her own television production company. Some cool images/epherma from the club are available at the Groovy Times site, or here, here, and here to be specific. WABC-TV supposedly filmed a documentary entitled "Cheetah, The Mod Mecca"--I wonder if the videotape survived?




There were also Cheetah clubs in Los Angeles (in the former Aragon Ballroom on Lick Pier in Venice Beach) and Chicago (I believe it was in Chi-town's Aragon Ballroom). I'm not certain if they were financially affiliated with the New York Cheetah, but they did utilize the same half cheetah, half long-haired/well-endowed girl-creature logo.

Whither the Cheetah? I'm not absolutely sure when it closed down. I've come across numerous references to a Cheetah in midtown Manhattan that specialized in boogaloo and salsa music in the early '70s--but I haven't been able to ascertain whether that was an evolution in the B'way and 53rd Cheetah or a different club altogether. I'm not even sure which corner at 53rd the Cheetah was on, nor what stands in its place today. It's either an office building or a hotel, I would reckon.

UPDATE 10/15/2007: Apparently the Box Tops played the Cheetah around Halloween of 1967, according to this rare clip from Zacherle's Disc-O-Teen. Dig Alex Chilton back when he was all young and raspy!




UPDATE 1/2/2008: This past weekend, Domenic Priore's Riot on Sunset Strip program (Sunday afternoons on luxuriamusic.com) featured music from the NYC '60s scene, including a couple of tracks from a heretofore unknown to me live album recorded at the Cheetah called Where It's At. Three bands are featured on the LP--The Esquires (doing Paint It Black, Get Off My Cloud, Goin' Out of My Head, and Uptight), Mike St. Shaw and the Prophets (Good Lovin' and Papa's Got a Brand New Bag), and the Thunder Frog Ensemble (Baby Please Don't Put Me On and Everybody Needs Somebody to Love).

UPDATE 1/19/2010: A while back I received a lovely e-mail from a Cheetah regular named Valerie who offered some wonderful recollections of the club--read it here.

UPDATE 5/27/2010: NYC Dreamin' of This Ain't the Summer of Love posted a cool 1968 article about the club a while back.

UPDATE 6/4/2010: I posted a bunch of 1967 Cheetah ads here.

UPDATE 11/16/2011: Here's a revised and improved post with 1967 Cheetah ads.

UPDATE 6/2/2014:  Howie Pyro did a post about the Cheetah on Dangerous Minds, incorporating some of the info gathered here by yours truly.  He found that someone uploaded the aforementioned "Cheetah: The Mod Mecca" film on Youtube over a year ago.





UPDATE 12/20/2014: The College No. 9 tumblr did a piece about Cheetah earlier this year. One of my other posts about the club was quoted at length.